Move Along ...
I've decided to move this blog to my own personal URL at www.DavidEricTomlinson.com, so get on over there and check it out.
Touching
As I was writing last night I had the TV on and was listening to a PBS special about music. The show was centered around recent studies into the connections between music and neuroscience. One of the contributors said that people often talk about music "touching them" - reaching into their souls and affecting them deeply. He recounted a memory from childhood about sitting on the couch listening to a song and suddenly weeping for its beauty. He said he was about six or seven years old at the time
The show kept switching to other angles on music and neuroscience, but kept circling back around to this scientist guy. He talked about the shape of what most people consider harmonious musical tones: how they form regular, wavelike patterns that make the organs in our ears vibrate. Eventually, in the typical solipsistic documentary style, he brought his hypothesis home and asserted that music really does "touch us" - in that it sends sound waves into our skulls to massage our ear drums, causing them to vibrate in a unique and idiosyncratic way.
We literally vibrate when we listen to it.
I'm writing about this because I went to see my aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary this last weekend in Shawnee, Oklahoma. During the party several great, emotional and funny speeches were given, and my second cousins Hilary and Hannah sang a song that within about two seconds brought me within a heartbeat of breaking down into tears. It was that beautiful. I don't know if it was the song, the event, the combination of the two or what - but the moment was really amazing and unforgettable.
When I was about fifteen I used to listen to the album "The Way It Is" by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. I haven't sat down and deliberately played the album from start to finish in about ten or twelve years, but tonight I did just that and suddenly I felt 15 again. I remembered my teenage bedroom, the teak bookshelf in there that smelled of new and stale pages, the strange and violent atmosphere of the house I lived in, the yearning for escape. The sunlight angling through the window shades in late winter. All of it came back with the force of a tidal wave, or freight train, or some other tired emotional metaphor.
My wife's dad Arthur has a house full of vinyl classical music. His wife used to call music "the other woman," he was such an opera buff. My wife Lisa once met Placido Domingo at an opera in San Francisco. She and her older sister strayed away from her dad at the after-party and bumped into him. He looked down at the two tiny red-headed girls before him and said, pleased beyond belief, "and who do YOU belong to?" Whenever Lisa tells this story she simultaneously lowers her voice into a deep baritone tone while increasing the volume of the word "YOU." The effect is a hilarious crescendo that perfectly captures the moment.
I'm realizing now that the "YOU" in Lisa's story resonates like the Bruce Hornsby album. I can literally feel the lilting cadences of her story. If everything goes as planned, in 37 years or so Lisa and I will have a 50th wedding anniversary.
If so, there will be music.
The show kept switching to other angles on music and neuroscience, but kept circling back around to this scientist guy. He talked about the shape of what most people consider harmonious musical tones: how they form regular, wavelike patterns that make the organs in our ears vibrate. Eventually, in the typical solipsistic documentary style, he brought his hypothesis home and asserted that music really does "touch us" - in that it sends sound waves into our skulls to massage our ear drums, causing them to vibrate in a unique and idiosyncratic way.
We literally vibrate when we listen to it.
I'm writing about this because I went to see my aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary this last weekend in Shawnee, Oklahoma. During the party several great, emotional and funny speeches were given, and my second cousins Hilary and Hannah sang a song that within about two seconds brought me within a heartbeat of breaking down into tears. It was that beautiful. I don't know if it was the song, the event, the combination of the two or what - but the moment was really amazing and unforgettable.
When I was about fifteen I used to listen to the album "The Way It Is" by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. I haven't sat down and deliberately played the album from start to finish in about ten or twelve years, but tonight I did just that and suddenly I felt 15 again. I remembered my teenage bedroom, the teak bookshelf in there that smelled of new and stale pages, the strange and violent atmosphere of the house I lived in, the yearning for escape. The sunlight angling through the window shades in late winter. All of it came back with the force of a tidal wave, or freight train, or some other tired emotional metaphor.
My wife's dad Arthur has a house full of vinyl classical music. His wife used to call music "the other woman," he was such an opera buff. My wife Lisa once met Placido Domingo at an opera in San Francisco. She and her older sister strayed away from her dad at the after-party and bumped into him. He looked down at the two tiny red-headed girls before him and said, pleased beyond belief, "and who do YOU belong to?" Whenever Lisa tells this story she simultaneously lowers her voice into a deep baritone tone while increasing the volume of the word "YOU." The effect is a hilarious crescendo that perfectly captures the moment.
I'm realizing now that the "YOU" in Lisa's story resonates like the Bruce Hornsby album. I can literally feel the lilting cadences of her story. If everything goes as planned, in 37 years or so Lisa and I will have a 50th wedding anniversary.
If so, there will be music.
Field Trip
Picking blueberries in southeast Texas this afternoon. H-O-T at 102 degrees fahrenheit, but worth the discomfort now that we're back home with our fruity booty.
Small Victories
My wife Lisa and I went out with some friends of ours to a posh local dance club in Dallas Friday night. Lisa's physician friend was able to "get us on the list" and the four of us arrived around 9:30 pm - late for us but the place was still empty - a pert, tanned graveyard of bouncers, bartenders and idling go-go dancers waiting for the real fun to begin.
We milled around for awhile, touring the multi-level dance floors and checking out the pricey VIP rooms, equipped with flat screen TVs, red velour couches and large balconies overlooking Main street in downtown Dallas. I told Lisa we were "living a short story" right then - the atmosphere was so strange and comical, and the four of us were so obviously fish out of water in the loud neon blare of the place.
Around 10:30 people started showing up, and the scene reminded me of a Sadie Hawkins dance in grade school - everyone was in their 20's or so (except for our group - all of us pushing or having broken past 40), but instead of getting their groove on the crowd stood expectantly around the disco ball brightness of the dance floor, waiting for something to happen. Finally, after waiting for what seemed like an eternity, Lisa and I walked out onto the dance floor and started grooving.
And that was the tipping point - the entire place took our cue and erupted into hours of vapid, oversexed gyrating. At one point the go-go dancers came out with dollar bills stuffed into their skin-tight dance shorts, the word "S-E-X" spelled out in pink rhinestones on their butts in case we were somehow unable to receive the message being transmitted by the jiggling of their silicone-enhanced curves. I also vaguely remember a scene from the movie "You Got Served" being re-enacted, with a girl and guy performing an aggressive kind of mating ritual / dance-off right before our eyes, surrounded by a howling bunch of hooligans.
My right ear is still ringing from the booming drone of the house music, but knowing that we were able to show those young whippersnappers how to cut a rug made my month.
We milled around for awhile, touring the multi-level dance floors and checking out the pricey VIP rooms, equipped with flat screen TVs, red velour couches and large balconies overlooking Main street in downtown Dallas. I told Lisa we were "living a short story" right then - the atmosphere was so strange and comical, and the four of us were so obviously fish out of water in the loud neon blare of the place.
Around 10:30 people started showing up, and the scene reminded me of a Sadie Hawkins dance in grade school - everyone was in their 20's or so (except for our group - all of us pushing or having broken past 40), but instead of getting their groove on the crowd stood expectantly around the disco ball brightness of the dance floor, waiting for something to happen. Finally, after waiting for what seemed like an eternity, Lisa and I walked out onto the dance floor and started grooving.
And that was the tipping point - the entire place took our cue and erupted into hours of vapid, oversexed gyrating. At one point the go-go dancers came out with dollar bills stuffed into their skin-tight dance shorts, the word "S-E-X" spelled out in pink rhinestones on their butts in case we were somehow unable to receive the message being transmitted by the jiggling of their silicone-enhanced curves. I also vaguely remember a scene from the movie "You Got Served" being re-enacted, with a girl and guy performing an aggressive kind of mating ritual / dance-off right before our eyes, surrounded by a howling bunch of hooligans.
My right ear is still ringing from the booming drone of the house music, but knowing that we were able to show those young whippersnappers how to cut a rug made my month.
Summer Reading List
My viewing of "Terminator: Salvation" yesterday afternoon was the official psychological beginning of the summer season for me here in Dallas. Despite having read some flaccid reviews I actually loved it, though I wish I hadn't seen the previews because they gave away a critical piece of information which would have made the movie much better.
We've fired up the Weber grill, dug around in closets and found our swimming trunks, purchased buckets of sun screen and insect repellent, and are making plans for a 4th of July trip to Michigan to see my little sister.
Here's a list of things I'm reading this summer as I finish another few short stories and start on a novel of my own:
- Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (collection of dark short stories by Wells Tower)
- Little Children (a novel about suburban dystopia by Tom Perotta)
- 2666 (not sure what this is about but I've heard rave reviews)
- Glimmertrain Stories (I've recently begun submitting stories here and thought I should support the cause)
Dream Big
After seeing a letter to my 6 year-old from someone named "Eddie":
"Who's Eddie?"
"A silly boy in my class."
"What's he like?"
"He wants to be a clown when he grows up. And Sarah wants to be a State Fair owner. She's going to have Eddie come and be a clown at her State Fair."
"Who's Eddie?"
"A silly boy in my class."
"What's he like?"
"He wants to be a clown when he grows up. And Sarah wants to be a State Fair owner. She's going to have Eddie come and be a clown at her State Fair."
Beginnings
Here's the first sentence from the new short story I'm working on, called "The Frog Prince" -
The summer Mom left us I learned to do the Fox Trot in Grandma Helga’s living room, my face pressed up against the mothball scent of her mannish bulk as we skipped and twirled over the hardwood floors of her farm house in west Texas.
